Dr. Pretlow to Participate in Significant Upcoming Event

An interesting virtual get-together and meeting of minds will take place in August, and Dr. Pretlow will be a participant (more on that later). This is not surprising, because the basic ideas are derived from the document “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” authored by Robert Pretlow & Suzette Glasner.

There is a great deal of interest in developing ways to diminish the cues that lead to overeating: the pervasive intrusion of advertising; the ubiquitous presence of fast-food outlets; the holidays on which people feel compelled to eat for social approval; and other insidious factors.

But getting rid of cues, triggers and temptations can only go so far. There is a number of reasons, some of them having to do with American freedoms. After a certain point, people begin to push back, muttering such phrases as “nanny state” and “government overreach.” But the aversion is not only to political involvement.

Basic human nature prompts children to start saying “No!” at an astonishingly early age. As kids grow, they can develop unrelenting stubbornness when being told what is good for them by parents, teachers, partners, or even healthcare professionals. The resistance trait often carries into adulthood. It tags along, as part of the familiar and unexamined luggage we drag through the years and sometimes need to be reminded about, so we can take it to the landfill and dump it in a hole.

The interesting part

There are people on whom cues and triggers do not work. They can look a bag of chips or a chicken wing straight in the eye and be unmoved. What is it about such people? What is their secret? Where does this superhuman ability come from?

If we consider the proposition that the true culprit is stress, the outlook becomes more hopeful, because that can be handled to some extent. If a person isn’t stressed out, cues and triggers have less opportunity to sink their teeth in. Apparently, some folks are simply not constitutionally predisposed to crumbling under stress. As with so many other human problems, there could be a genetic element.

It is also possible that these fortunate individuals have successfully and non-violently removed one or more sources of stress from their lives — and if so, this is also worth looking into. Maybe some folks have learned to cope with stress by cultivating proactive, creative and effective ways to burn off nervous energy. They don’t get overwhelmed and eat themselves into oblivion, because they have developed toolkits. A person can learn a skillset, which is what BrainWeighve is all about.

What to look forward to

The August event, “Consensus Building Workshops on addiction-like symptoms related to consumption of certain foods,” is the creation of four colleagues whose ambitious goal is to persuade the World Health Organization “to include symptoms of addiction related to food, as a disease, in the International Classification of Disease, ICD-11.”

It will consist of a number of online workshops on the subject of food addiction as a disease.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” Springer.com, 06/22/22

Obesity and Telehealth

The term telehealth covers a lot of ground. It has to do with using electronic technologies to disperse needed information and support vital communication, especially between medical personnel and patients, and includes the ability to ask for and receive advice. People can absorb helpful information and then ask the professionals about the need for and availability of intervention. The technology is particularly brilliant at monitoring everything from a patient’s vital signs to their food intake.

A lot of people cannot walk, and many more do not drive, which is also acutely limiting. A lot of people should not go out because of compromised immunity, or they live too far from the nearest medical center to make a journey practical or possible. Thanks to technology, a medic can not only ask for a description of the symptoms but look at the rash or the swollen throat from afar. All of that is in the specific area of telemedicine, a term that leans toward more direct care.

Expansive telehealth

The larger category of telehealth can include distance learning for professionals, data management, presentations, staff meetings, supervisory sessions, and other functions the patient is not directly connected to.

In the summer of 2012, Janna Stephens, who went on to become a very large presence in the field, wrote this about a certain age group:

[T]he intervention needs to be something that will stimulate them and something they want to do. Adolescents spend hours on their smartphones and use applications to do just about everything. So why not weight loss?

In 2014, Stephens and two co-authors published “Technology-Assisted Weight Management Interventions: Systematic Review of Clinical Trials.” After examining nearly 40 appropriate studies, they concluded that overweight and obese adults could certainly benefit from behavioral interventions assisted by technology. But sadly, out of even such a small number of studies, only a few used mobile devices and…

[…] none was able to identify which features were most responsible for changes in outcomes, and few reported long-term outcomes.

In the following year, Stephens published “Smartphone Technology to Decrease BMI in Overweight and Obese Adolescents.” The object was to arouse interest in studying the use of a smartphone app to help high school students lose weight. She described the application’s purpose as “self-monitoring of dietary habits and physical activity… combined with a one time behavioral counseling session.” She also specified that the philosophical basis for the study was Social Cognitive Theory, “which focuses on strategies to increase self-efficacy for healthy behaviors.”

In the same year Janna Stephens RN, BSN, Ph.D., was also one of three co-authors of “Young Adults, Technology, and Weight Loss: A Focus Group Study.” The researchers sought out the opinions of young adults about obesity, weight-loss counseling, and smartphone technology, and discovered (and remember, this was back in 2015):

Although young adults do not know about specific technology that exists, they are open to learning this technology as long as it fits into their lifestyle.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Technology Can Trim Childhood Obesity,” Newswise.com, 08/09/12
Source: “Technology-Assisted Weight Management Interventions: Systematic Review of Clinical Trials,” LiebertPub.com, 12/22/14
Source: “Smartphone Technology to Decrease BMI in Overweight and Obese Adolescents,” Grantome.com, 01/01/15
Source: “Young Adults, Technology, and Weight Loss: A Focus Group Study,” Nih.gov, 02/18/15
Image by EpicTopTen.com/CC BY 2.0

A Decade of Tech, Part 10

As we have seen, electronic screens as a genre are both wonderful and dangerous. Childhood Obesity News has reported on examples of both kinds.

In “globesity” news, in 2018, an extensive article about the obesity/electronic screen connection was issued from Dubai, stating that in the United Arab Emirates, approximately nine out of every 10 children were spending hours every day interacting with their smartphones, tablets, and other electronic gadgets. A survey of at least 1,000 children in that country and Saudi Arabia revealed that they practiced a “balanced usage of mobile devices for both leisure and learning activities.”

At the same time, it was learned that parents viewed obesity as the most pervasive children’s health issue. Close to 70% of the parents realized that there was an obvious link between obesity and ubiquitous screen usage. Asma Ali Zain wrote,

As per the survey, more than half believe that watching videos, playing video games and using electronic devices have educational benefits… Three in five said that children should be taught to use technologies from a young age, and one in three actively encourage their children to use these devices.

Parents believe children are more likely to spend time taking photos, listening to music or browsing the Internet. (Browsing the Internet and listening to music are more popular in the UAE as compared to KSA).

The surveyed parents tended to push back against the social media concept, and believed that two out of three of their children were not signed up with one of those apps. Of course, the concept of keeping kids (or adults either) away from their screens, anywhere at any time, is more aspirational than pragmatic.

In the view of Omnibus Research head Kerry McLaren, it seemed pretty obvious that most parents could point to a definite link between technology and obesity. While it seems that they didn’t feel much could be done to cut down screen time, they were quite conscious, in theory anyway, of the importance of a healthful diet. One of the factors affecting obesity is the area’s severe heat, which precludes spending a lot of time outdoors and makes vigorous exercise unattractive.

A mother who was interviewed admitted to occasionally turning off the WiFi “to force her kids to take a much needed break,” and no doubt other parents resorted to the same trick at times.

Like many other countries, the UAE was adversely affected by the COVID crisis. In 2018 the childhood obesity rate had been 12%, and by 2020 it was over 17%. However, according to pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Asma Deeb, probably about one-third (around 33%) of children in the Abu Dhabi metropolis are overweight.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Gadgets causing obesity among kids: Survey,” KhaleejTimes.com, 07/19/18
Source: “Tackling childhood obesity, one family at a time,” ssmc.ae/news, 07/25/22
Image by Damian Zech/CC BY 2.0

Everything You Know About Screens Is Wrong

“You laugh at my horse, you buy my horse.”

How’s that for an old saying? The thing you scorn today, at some future time you will want for your own. It’s a cruel irony. In the struggle to reduce childhood obesity, one of the basic tenets has been the necessity to get kids away from electronic screens.”Stop playing those video games and sharing TikTok dance videos and flirt-texting with that girl or boy,” we have insisted. “Get up and move around,” we have urged.

The mantra has been, Screens = Bad. And now, it’s all different. Now we want everybody to have screens, to access their health monitoring and weight-loss apps. What a pointed example of flip-floppy reversal!

The COVID era in its intense phase exposed the “digital divide” as a nationwide crisis. In 2020, SFGATE’s Editor-at-Large Andrew Chamings wrote,

Across the country, approximately 15-16 million K-12 public school students, or 30% of all public K-12 students, live in households either without an internet connection or device adequate for distance learning at home.

This left almost one-third of homebound children at risk of “significant learning loss.” (Incidentally, it was also found that a surprising number of American teachers — estimated at hundreds of thousands — lack adequate tools and connectivity in their homes.) One study found that a hefty proportion of students were limited to doing their “distance learning” via their parents’ smartphones. That situation creates a whole set of problems, because the grownups need their phones to help them make a living and pay the rent, whether they are in the house or at an outside job.

The pandemic and the consequent sudden demand for home-based tutoring demonstrated that, for better or worse, an awful lot of kids just don’t “do” screens. As a previous post mentioned, numerous families are in no way equipped to facilitate their children in distance learning. A lot of American kids don’t have access to a computer, or a table to set it on, or a domestic environment conducive to learning. Not surprisingly, they tend to live in communities that are underserved in many ways.

No matter how smart and motivated kids are, they can’t do the work if they don’t have the gear. Lacking hardware, the most comprehensive and cleverly-designed program is useless to them. Even if by some miracle they obtain a laptop, tablet, or cell phone, they are super-vulnerable to thievery.

Nobody is available to teach them the basic usage of the device. They lack the know-how and the money to get it connected to the wired world. Their parents lack the time and the tech savvy. In a piece called, “In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both,” New York Times reporter Deb Perelman wrote, “Remote learning has already widened racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps because of disparities in access…”

Policy cannot be guided by “people with cushioning.” Unless it works for everyone, policy is baloney. Without the technology and machinery to support it, even the most brilliant program or application is baloney too.

Wouldn’t it be great if every school district in the country had a fully-functioning plan for online education? Perelman wrote,

Successful online learning will require much more than taking a traditional lesson plan and doing it in front of the computer. Good online teaching takes expertise and skill… and it means that teachers should be designing their own lessons, rather than districts outsourcing education to for-profit companies.

In the name of both justice and common sense, Shayla R. Griffin, Ph.D., insists that all teachers need state-of-the-art equipment and full support to do their jobs, as much as all families need computers and internet access.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Report: 1 in 4 Calif. kids don’t have adequate internet access to learn from home,” SFGate.com, 06/29/20
Source: “In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both.,” NYTimes.com, 07/02/20
Source: “Schools Aren’t Opening. We Have to Pay Parents to Stay Home with Their Kids.,” Medium.com, 07/29/20
Image by Boston Public Library/CC BY 2.0